The Round 10 project evaluated climate change effects on net ecosystem carbon balance (Loudermilk et al. 2013), as well as a suite of fuel treatment scenarios to assess treatment effectiveness for reducing wildfire carbon emissions and maximizing total landscape C storage (Loudermilk et al. 2014). This project (Round 12), integrated the effects of drought and insects into the estimates of carbon dynamics and tree community response and feedbacks over the next 100 years, examined model accuracy of forest productivity (i.e., ANPP) with empirical estimates, and examined fuel treatment effectiveness for mitigating the effects from the interacting disturbances, i.e., climate (including drought), wildfires, and bark beetle outbreaks.

The primary objectives were to evaluate climate change effects associated with drought stress (reduced forest productivity), bark beetle outbreaks, and management mitigation options across the forested landscape of the Lake Tahoe Basin. In addition, in situ estimates of scaled ANPP from tree-ring data were compared with model outputs across a coincident 20-year period (1987-2006) climate to investigate model accuracy of forest productivity, as influenced by moisture sensitivity and bark beetle outbreaks.